About Me

My photo
Oil painter. BFA VCU. 92, MFA TCU. 94. Permanent collections of The Dallas Museum of Art, Art Museum of South Tx, many corporate/private collections in US, Manama Bahrain & London. I've lectured at TCU, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Kimbell Museum & many arts organizations. Numerous solo & group exhibitions in Tx, NM, NY, Va & Ga. Received Best in Show from James Surls, Louis Jimenez, et al. Showing at Wm Campbell Contemporary Art, Galveston by Buchanan Gallery & D.M.Allison Art Houston, Wade Wilson Fine Art,SantaFe. My work hangs in the Captain's Boardroom of the USS Fort Worth Littoral Combat Ship; the Davis&Eugenie Stradivari at the request of The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra to commemorate their centennial gala. See JTGrant and his work in the upcoming release of "Contemporary Art of the Southwest" in late 2013. JT Grant is the sole/exclusive owner of the copyright of all images & posts published on this site pursuant to The Copyright Act of 1976,PL#94-553, Sec102; transfer, reproduction or use without written permission by the artist strictly forbidden. contact: jtgrantstcc@gmail.com or Facebook: Jt Grant

Monday, April 18, 2011

PICKLED BULLSHIT

Precisely five centuries ago this year, 1511ce, Michelangelo illuminated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the "Creation of Adam." Also that year brought Raphael's "The School of Athens," Durer's "Small Passion," Titian's "Salome'," the publication of the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius' "De Architectura;" working were da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Bellini, Grunewald, and on ad gloriam.

Almost five hundred years ago, as I've mentioned here before, Veronese painted - and so risked excommunication - a wry, delightfully witty and deeply meaningful "Last Supper." Polemical, intended to stretch the envelope, to comment intelligently on the shabby state of then-modern life and the pathetic shallowness of rich, contemporary aesthetes and fashion-whore bounders he used them to populate the composition presenting a vulgar, contemporary banquet. Too great to reject out of hand he was, nonetheless , placed under Vatican threat of literal damnation and thus compelled to soften the edge of his critique by the semantic slight of hand of changing it's title to "Feast in the House of Levi."

By way of comparison, about 1,500 years earlier the wealthiest of the wealthy, Nero, was sold a single crystal wine glass for what is considered to be the equivalent of one million dollars-US today. The vaporous and vapid who float, stratospheric above we lesser grubby earthbound souls have changed little since either Nero or Veronese. Though all those of wealth are by no means shallow more than ever enjoy inflating their egos with the feted gas of vulgar excess in the art market. Silly piddlings of thought, weak exercises not of art, but art theory are made to seem important only by the outrageousness of their price tags.

Nero's wineglass no longer exists. If it does it is either earthbound or sitting, ignored and unrecognized in some backwater museum on a shelf labeled "glass, Roman, c 100ce" for which the museum likely paid in the range of two or three thousand dollars. It's prior value based solely on a fool with endless means, his absolute belief in his own genius - and a crafty salesman.

Today's art-world Neros are still fiddling - and themselves being well played - while worthy thought burns. Financially tubby intellectually anorexic these art market gasbags float blissfully self-satisfied in the rarified outermost stratosphere of cutting edge "art." These happy, vapid few are constantly on the lookout for something - anything - that can make them appear to have the prominence and intellectual mettle they are absolutely convinced they possess. Petite Neros, they mistake great wealth for great worth and great hucksters for great advisors.

Clambering against each other to occupy the cutting edge, the needle's tip of Kandinsky's metaphoric inexorably rising triangle of spiritual and aesthetic evolution they fail to attend to his caveat that periods of spiritual deadness in art are marked by the overwhelming desire to possess an object of value rather than to experience a work of art's spiritual depth. And so they make smut of art and art of folly.

Imagine now, if you will, the year 2511, five hundred years opposite our current place relative the monumental thought, the humanist genius of the Renaissance. Assuming any of the current crop of art mag fodder survives our society, our common intellect could actually be gauged by crumpled auto bumpers, a single florescent light bulb (then having been changed 1,214 times) glowing numbly at a carefully placed 45 degree angle 3.5" off the floor, the astonishing buffoonery of self portraits in frozen blood and floors painted in vaginal effluent with the artist's head of hair as brush.

There, too, baffling or worse boring our descendants is the utter, cynical folly of a dead baby bull bristling with ever so sinister black painted arrows strategically malleted into it's still-born carcass (the queasy artist would never sully his own karma by actually killing it himself, I mean get real!) and hung from the neck by a wire in a fishtank of formaldehyde. Get it? Why, yes, of course! It's St Sebastian! How frightfully droll ....and only 5.6 million dollars plus 50,000.00 every time it's hauled out for a showing. Fabulous!

I can see it on the museum shelf there in 2511 - half of it precipitated to the bottom of its murky little tank, a card under it "American, c 2011pce, preserved animal specimen, unknown ritual."
Pickled bullshit.